by Nancy Reagan
A woman from one of the shops in Washington came with the prosthesis and bras, and I took care of all that. She was a little self-conscious, but I accepted it and even joked about it. She told me that her business had increased after my mastectomy.
November 10: My “coming-out” party—a state dinner for President and Mrs. Herzog of Israel. They are both charming. He speaks with an Irish brogue—he’s the son of a rabbi from Dublin.
At dinner, I had asked that Dr. Paul Marks, the head of the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute in New York, be seated next to me. I wanted to hear what he had to say about the mastectomy. He told me about the calls they had received from the different networks and television stations, asking for a doctor to go on television to discuss my surgery. He told everyone not to do it because it was unprofessional.
He also told me that there has been a sharp increase in the number of women coming in for mammograms, which certainly pleased me.
Dr. Marks said, “I’m going to tell you something. It’s really none of my business, but you shouldn’t even be at this dinner. It’s too soon. It normally takes six weeks to recover from surgery, but you had a setback with the death of your mother. It’s very emotional, mentally and physically, and you won’t start to get your energy back for at least three months. I understand you’re going to New York tomorrow for the Feltsman concert. I think that’s crazy. [Vladimir Feltsman is a renowned pianist from Moscow who was a refusenik for years. Ron met him when he was over there, and Ronnie and I were helpful in getting him out of Russia. I had invited him to give his first concert at the White House, which he did, and I was looking forward to being at his New York debut.]
“The trouble is, you look well, so people assume you are well, but you’re not. You haven’t healed, and it’s important that you concentrate on your exercises.”
Everything he said was right, and I canceled my plans to go to the concert.
With the Gorbachevs coming next month, I have plenty to do.
16
Showdown
(Donald Regan and
Iran-Contra)
IF, by some miracle, I could take back one decision in Ronnie’s presidency, it would be his agreement in January 1985 that Jim Baker and Donald Regan should swap jobs.
It seemed like a good idea at the time—a little unusual, perhaps, but reasonable. Jim, who had served Ronnie well as chief of staff, was worn out, and Donald Regan was more than willing to come to the White House after four years as secretary of the Treasury. When Baker and Regan suggested the switch, there was no reason to expect that this new arrangement would lead to a political disaster.
I never knew Donald Regan before he came over as Ronnie’s new chief of staff. I knew of him, of course. We had met socially, and I had heard that he was a bright man and a strong manager. During Ronnie’s first term he had evidently done a good job at Treasury, where he had helped put through the administration’s new economic program.
But during the second term, Don was not my favorite person in the White House. And he wasn’t exactly cuckoo about me, either.
For the first few months, we got along fine. It wasn’t until July 1985, when Ronnie had his cancer operation, that Don and I had our first run-in. Within forty-eight hours of the surgery, Don wanted to bring in George Bush and Bud McFarlane to meet with the president.
I thought that was much too soon—and so did the doctors. But Don thought it was more important for Ronnie to resume his schedule of appointments.
“Let’s wait,” I told Don. “Remember, he’s just had major surgery. I know he’s the president, but don’t forget that he’s also a patient like any other patient. If you push him too hard, he could have a relapse.”
Before Ronnie was out of the hospital, Don and I had another disagreement. Don came out to Bethesda every day, and he wanted to make the trip by helicopter. That seemed wrong to me. I thought it was inappropriate for anyone other than the president to use the helicopter except in an emergency. The drive to the hospital took about forty-five minutes, and everybody else who came traveled by car. I must have had some inkling, even then, of what increasingly bothered me about Don Regan, which was that he often acted as if he were president.
His very first day on the job, Don said that he saw himself as the “chief operating officer” of the country. But he was hired to be chief of staff. He liked the word “chief,” but he never really understood that his title also included the words “of staff.” And he often acted as if his position had some independent government standing.
And so, for example, he was the first chief of staff ever to have regular Secret Service protection. And he evidently admired the patio outside Ronnie’s office, because when he had his office renovated and enlarged, a beautiful flagstone patio was put in—which was noticeably larger than the president’s. I was in the West Wing one day when Don spotted me and said, “I’d like you to see my new office.” When he showed me the new patio, he said, “I didn’t want any fuss, so I paid for all of this myself.”
I learned later that the patio was paid for primarily by government funds.
As Ronnie returned to the White House and gradually resumed his normal schedule, Don and I started getting along better. But over the next few months he made several public statements that annoyed me.
On the subject of economic sanctions against South Africa, Don said that American women might not be eager to give up their diamonds, platinum, and gold. I thought that remark was insensitive and demeaning to women, and I resented it.
Then, just before the Geneva summit, he told the Washington Post that women were not “going to understand [missile] throw-weights or what is happening in Afghanistan or what is happening in human rights.”
That sounded like a man who didn’t think women had any brains. I don’t usually agree with Eleanor Smeal from the National Organization for Women, but I could certainly understand when she said she was glad to learn that the president took Bonzo with him to Geneva.
It was bad enough that with these two comments Don Regan had offended more than half of the American people. But then, after the Reykjavik summit in October 1986, he went on to insult Ronnie and the whole administration. “Some of us,” he told the New York Times, “are like a shovel brigade that follows a parade down Main Street.”
I was furious when I read that. I didn’t think the chief of staff should be making any public statements except to explain or clarify the president’s position, but this one was incredible. If that’s how Don saw his job, what kind of loyalty could Ronnie expect from him on other issues? And what kind of example was he setting for the rest of Ronnie’s advisers?
But that was the problem: Don Regan didn’t see himself as one of the president’s advisers. He didn’t consider himself to be part of the White House staff. He saw himself as a kind of deputy president.
I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. By the time Ronnie returned from Reykjavik, I had been approached by a stream of high government officials and congressional leaders. Some came to see me in the White House and others phoned me, but all were concerned about Donald Regan. They told me he had poor relations with both Congress and the media. That he was restricting their access to the president. That he was explosive and difficult to deal with. That he was intimidating his subordinates in the office. And that good, experienced people were starting to leave the West Wing because they couldn’t work with him.
Some of those people were calling me and saying, “We’re scared of this guy. The tensions over here are incredible. Morale is low. Can’t you do something?”
I gave the same answer to everybody: “What are you telling me for? You ought to be telling my husband!”
But almost nobody did. Maybe some were embarrassed to complain to the president about his chief of staff. Others were intimidated by the Oval Office. And still others found that under Donald Regan it was virtually impossible to see the president alone. It’s difficult to talk to the president if you can’t get to the president.
Even George Bush came to see me in the residence about Don. As he got off the elevator and we walked into the West Hall, he said, “I didn’t want to say this on the phone, but I think Don should resign.”
“I agree with you,” I said, “and I wish you’d tell my husband. I can’t be the only one who’s saying this to him.”
“Nancy,” he said, “that’s not my role.”
“That’s exactly your role,” I replied.
But as far as I know, George Bush never spoke to Ronnie about Don Regan.
It was around this time that Donald Hodel, secretary of the Interior, told Maureen that he had called the White House to ask for a fifteen-minute meeting with Ronnie. But even he couldn’t get in. Don Regan told him that the president didn’t meet with anyone in the Cabinet individually except for the secretaries of State and Defense.
Then there was art incident with Kathy Osborne, Ronnie’s personal secretary, that I found alarming. Apparently, she sent a certain document to Ronnie without first showing it to Don. When he heard about it, Don stormed out of his office and exploded: How dare she send that paper to the president? Didn’t she know that everything went through him first? If she ever did this again, she’d be fired!
I couldn’t believe it. He was threatening to fire Ronnie’s personal secretary? Everybody knew that Kathy reported directly to Ronnie. She had been with him for four years in Sacramento, and seven more in Washington. Ronnie has always been very fond of her, and she works for him to this day. The fact that Don thought he could fire her struck me as a very bad sign.
By now it was clear to me that Donald Regan was in the wrong job. He may be a talented man, but this was the wrong place for him. First, a good chief of staff should remain in the shadows. He operates behind the scenes and should not be making statements to the media. Most good chiefs of staff are relatively anonymous.
Second, the chief of staff must have political skills. He works with Congress, and he serves as the president’s ambassador to a wide segment of Washington—including the press. Don Regan knew a lot about business and finance, but he had little experience in politics.
Third, chief of staff is fundamentally a people job. But most of the people Don came in contact with couldn’t get along with him. It’s true that he got along with Ronnie, but Ronnie gets along with everybody.
But Ronnie wasn’t hearing any of this because people were coming to me instead of to him. And the three men who could have told Ronnie what was going on were no longer in the White House. Jim Baker was over at Treasury. Ed Meese was running the Justice Department. And Michael Deaver had left government. Of the four people who had been closest to Ronnie during his first term, I was the only one left.
Although I believed for a long time that Donald Regan was in the wrong job, my “power” in getting him to leave has been greatly exaggerated. Believe me, if I really were the dragon lady that he described in his book, he would have been out the door many months earlier.
Later, when Don did leave, I took a lot of heat for protecting Ronnie, and for allegedly interfering in the affairs of state. But I had to get in there because nobody else would tell Ronnie what was going on.
Did I talk to Ronnie about Don Regan? Absolutely. Did I pass on what I was hearing from White House officials and congressional leaders? Of course.
But that doesn’t mean Ronnie listened.
For a long time, he just didn’t take these reports seriously. Eventually, I came to realize that there were, in effect, two Donald Regans: the one people were telling me about, and the one Ronnie saw every day. With Ronnie, Don was jovial, affable, and good-humored, the genial Irishman who always had a good story. Ronnie genuinely liked him, and they had a good rapport.
So when I tried to tell Ronnie what I was hearing, it was hard for him to believe. It was a side of Don he never saw, and he honestly couldn’t see why anyone was complaining.
Then, in November 1986, a series of events occurred which turned a difficult situation into a full-blown crisis. Suddenly the Don Regan problem became subsumed into a much bigger problem—Iran-contra.
It began on November 3, when a Lebanese magazine reported that the United States had been supplying military spare parts to Iran, and that Robert McFarlane, the president’s national security adviser, had visited Tehran to discuss the possible release of American hostages in Lebanon. Ten days later, Ronnie went on television to explain what he knew about all of this. When he was done, the polls showed that, for the first time during Ronnie’s presidency, most Americans did not believe him.
As it turned out, people were right to be skeptical. Although Ronnie thought he was telling the truth, he was relying on information provided by Admiral John Poindexter, who had replaced Bud McFarlane as national security adviser. And that information was—to put it mildly—seriously incomplete.
On November 19, Ronnie held a press conference to try to clear things up. Here, too, he made several major errors. I’m still angry that Poindexter sent Ronnie out there without telling him everything.
By now, both the House and the Senate intelligence committees had announced that they would convene hearings on the arms sale to Iran.
I’ll never forget the expression on Ronnie’s face after Ed Meese came to him on the afternoon of November 24 with astonishing and alarming news: that although Iran had paid $30 million for American military equipment, less than half of that money had been accounted for. Oliver North had admitted diverting at least some of the profits to the Nicaraguan contras.
The news was so shattering that everything just stopped. Ronnie came into our bedroom looking pale and absolutely crushed. “Honey,” he said, “I’ve got some bad news. Ed Meese just came in and told me that money from the sale of arms to Iran went to the contras.”
Although I didn’t really understand it yet, I could tell from his voice that this was very serious.
“First thing tomorrow,” he said, “Ed and I are going right to the press about this so they won’t think we’re hiding anything.”
If Ronnie was incredulous, I was furious. Later that evening I called Don Regan from my office to let him know how upset I was. I felt very strongly that Ronnie had been badly served, and I wanted Don to know. Maybe this was unfair of me, but to some extent I blamed him for what had happened. He was the chief of staff, and if he didn’t know, I thought, he should have. A good chief of staff has sources everywhere. He should practically be able to smell what’s going on.
Later, in his own defense, Don asked, “Does a bank president know whether a bank teller is fiddling around with the books?” Maybe not, but this was the same man who once bragged that not a sparrow could fly through the White House without his hearing it.
I’m not saying that Iran-contra was Don Regan’s doing. But it did occur on his watch, and when it came out, he should have taken responsibility. I can’t imagine that this problem would have developed during Ronnie’s first term, when the “troika” of Baker, Meese, and Deaver was in charge. The West Wing was far more open then, and if anything devious had been going on in the White House basement, it would have come to light—and certainly to Ronnie’s attention. But now all the power of the troika was concentrated in one man.
I must have dropped ten pounds over the next few months. I tried to eat, but I couldn’t eat much. Every day when we turned on the television, we didn’t know what we were going to hear. It was crazy—I was relying on the media for information about what was going on in our own house. In eight years in Sacramento and six more in Washington, we had never experienced anything like this. The entire government seemed to grind to a halt, and only Iran-contra mattered. Every day Ronnie was being accused of things I know he didn’t do.
Ronnie was genuinely baffled. He kept expecting that everything would fall into place, that there was a rational explanation for all this. But he couldn’t stop it, and he couldn’t control it.
He did, however, make three important decisions during the early weeks of the crisis.
First, he established a three-man commission, headed by Senator John Tower, that would take an independent look at what had happened.
Second, Ronnie brought in David Abshire, our ambassador to NATO, to ensure that all of the ongoing investigations—the Tower Commission, the congressional investigations, and the independent counsel—received the right information. Whatever had happened, there would be no cover-up in Ronald Reagan’s White House. Despite the inevitable comparisons, Iran-contra was not Watergate, and the Reagan White House was not the Nixon White House. By dealing with the problem openly, Ronnie may have saved his presidency.
Ronnie’s third decision was that he wouldn’t comment on the daily charges that were swirling around Washington until all the facts were in and the Tower Commission had issued its report. This took a great deal of restraint, but he didn’t want to be in the position of responding today to information that might well be contradicted tomorrow. In other words, no more press conferences until he had some answers.
Ronnie was in an impossible bind: Holding a press conference would have created the risk of being contradicted by new information, but not holding one created a vacuum and gave some people the impression that Ronnie had something to hide.
It was terribly hard for both of us to sit through those long months and have him accused of making secret deals and being part of underhand arrangements. Ronnie has always had a reputation for integrity, and it went right to his soul to see his character being questioned every day. At the time, a large segment of the public assumed that Ronnie must have known everything, but as this book goes to press, some of the basic facts about Iran-contra are still in dispute.
It was a dark and hurtful time, and it lasted for months. Every time I opened a newspaper or turned on the television, there was the same drumbeat. My pals called me often with encouragement: Kay Graham, Meg Greenfield, George Will, Mike Wallace, and Dick Helms. “I’ve been through this sort of thing,” Dick said, referring to the Watergate era, “and you just have to sit it out. I know how painful and difficult it is.” I felt a great empathy from people during this period. They didn’t always know exactly what to say to me, but they made it clear that they understood and sympathized.